> Just have a question that I'm coming out of lurkage to ask: Are high school friendships extremely important? Do you still retain your friends from high school, or is college/whatever the defining factor of your social life?
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> To put this into context: Recently, my friends are all turning themselves against each other with lies and rumors, and they're basically asking me to choose sides. I want to stay out of it, but there's only so much I can say before I'll slip and end up just being a bad liar and a bad friend. I suppose this does sound slightly commonplace, but I've just been sheltered a lot. (That and the fact that my school is mostly academic, not social, with an around 60% Asian population.) Is it possible that I'm just unlucky and received the bad deal of high school friendships, or is this something that happens to everyone and isn't all that important? Hm.
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> ~Crystal"Maybe becoming a hermit isn't all that bad of an idea"109

I only really kept one friendship from high school. I always found it odd, though, that I kept in contact with that friend, who went to a different school for a semester before coming here, when there are two other people I know who go here who I barely ever talk to. For the most part, if I talk to friends from high school at all, it's a brief 'Hi, how are you?' exchange on AIM. So it's probably not a huge deal if you end up alienating the people you have no plans on keeping in contact with, anyway. You'll find more people in college with interests similar to yours, too; that's not an easy thing to do in high school.